


abyssopelagic

by rukafais



Series: a study of divinity [4]
Category: Hollow Knight (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Is there a tag for just The Abyss because like, not enough for character tags i don't think, radiance and the pale king are also mentioned but like, thats basically the entire premise of this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 13:05:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19151602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rukafais/pseuds/rukafais
Summary: The void is a sea. In its depths swim countless memories.It remembers, in its own way.





	abyssopelagic

**Author's Note:**

> How do you do a character study for something that's more like a force than a character...? I don't know, I made my life way harder with this. Whoops.
> 
> Beginning and ending quotes are from Jane Yolen's poem, "Warning from the Undine".

_“Do not think that I am wave top,_  
_Do not think that I am tow,_  
_I am ocean, up and under,_  
_I am legion high and low”_

**I.**

_“My dear sister,”_ says the god-in-flame. His fiery form reflects in distorted crimson on the darkness’ surface. _“Just because it stands in opposition to you does not mean it has no right to exist.”_

 _“It is still my enemy,”_ says the god-in-light, Her voice loud enough to create ripples in the water, Her anger enough to push the shadows away from her, repulsing it.

The endless, bottomless sea, the neverending darkness, says nothing. It merely accepts. It always does.

Once the lights-in-dream are gone, the water stirs no longer.

It sleeps. It does not dream.

**II.**

The mortals bury their dead. They burn them. They sing songs and crown them with flowers or wrap them in silks, and float them down rivers, or sink them into lakes and seas.

The bodies sink into the depths. They pass into shadow. They cross the boundary that only the dead know, their souls adrift on the currents, and the darkness cradles them like children.

The mortals weep and grieve. Some of them find it too unbearable to move on. Regret and guilt cling to them, constant burdens, constant companions.

They invite the darkness of dead places into themselves. They hear the rivers running down to the silent sea where ghosts sleep. They, too, do not dream.

Some of them sink into the darkness themselves. Some of them face the dark shore, hearing the movement of the waves buzzing in their heads, and they turn away.

They are crossroads-children, these mortal creatures. They live. Their hearts still beat strong, their breath still comes, but they are not unchanged.

The first of them names a title, for those who have seen the endless dark and returned;

_“Confessor”._

They cast away the regrets of others, their sadness, their guilt. Making it manifest, for reconciliation, for hope, for life.

Through them the void is shaped. Through them, it understands the deep sadness of the dead.

The endless darkness hums all alone, in the veins of the world, in the shadow of dream and light, and sings toneless lullabies to the ghosts in the depths. It cradles them in its currents.

They sleep in peace.

**III.**

Kingdoms in water are no closer to the darkness than any other. It is a location that exists in head and heart, at any distance. It is terribly easy, in some ways, for some bugs, to reach it; for others, the only way they will see it is at the end of their lives, where all things go in endless sleep.

But these ones court the darkness. Extoll its virtues, worship it. Perhaps they hope for a god to be made manifest in it, or a messiah, or something else.

It does not think about such things, at least not in those terms. These bugs are not like the Confessors, who even now wander the world, lifting others from their own darkness; these ones have desires, they have needs. They want the darkness itself to shape to them.

It does not understand. But they name it Void, and they pour it into moulds. They give it emblems, shapes, imprints of their own wants. They build statues in its honor.

They invite it into their kingdom. And the darkness does as it always has; it sweeps the streets clean, holds them in its embrace, like it has done for the countless mortals before it.

Through them it feels fear, rage, betrayal; the sense of being left wanting. Fire in the darkness. They are restless, painful ghosts.

It has felt these things before, but never so much at once.

It accepts their anger, their pain, their regrets. Their blame.

It always does.

**IV.**

The god-in-flame is much smaller now, much more diminished. He stands without his sister. But the darkness still reflects his former glory, his former form; it has not forgotten him.

 _“So you....remember me,”_ he says, and his voice creaks rustily from disuse.

(He died, then, crashing violently from sky to sea, from light to dark, into the open ocean beyond dreams. Of course it had remembered him. His old body slumbers in the deep, drifting in the currents. Tattered and broken, still wounded, but wrapped in silence, the embrace of the endless sea.)

The Void does not respond. It ripples and hums and crashes around him, in the language of the tides, of movement, of freely flowing water. The only way it knows.

It has never needed a voice to be understood.

 _“They...gave you a name,”_ he says. _“Tried to shape....control you.”_

His laugh is broken metal and cracked shells, the breathless snap of flame. The water vibrates, absorbing the dream-sound.

_“No...I do not understand it...myself...”_

If he does not understand it, he with so much experience in mortals, his image shaped by them, then it does not know what it should or can do.

_“There is...no should...not for you.”_

They do not understand it, that worship. Perhaps they never will. But other gods need worship, sustain themselves on it. Does worship mean they are a god?

_“Not like us...not a dream...not guidance...not light. You are with them...in their shadows...their lives. Part of their struggle...end of all things. Always there....”_

Then it will do as it has always done.

It will accept.

_“My vessels...will come to you...in time...”_

_“Be kind...to them...as you are to all things.”_

It sees him again, occasionally; in the rubble and ruins of the old and dead. Always under the skin of a different guise (a vessel, he had said; it does not yet understand what that means).

But it does as he asks, always. For a time, his children are flames in the darkness, warmth and light. It wraps them in its embrace, until they rise again, rejoining him.

**V.**

As the kingdom crumbles above, as the god-in-light and god-in-metal fight for control, it simply accepts. It takes the dead - when it can. The god-in-light keeps the souls of the dead, not allowing them to return to the ocean in which all things must pass, and it does not understand.

But this, it accepts.

Cold hands, sharp light, gathers from them. In the ruins of a dead kingdom, the god-in-metal takes parts of them away.

It makes things from it that they do not understand. Things that have the barest flickering of light inside, trapped in cold shells, made to last forever. Never to rejoin, never to return.

Perhaps it is one of those things they are not meant to understand.

The god-in-metal makes containers, masks, shells of light from which there is no escaping. He makes life from darkness, from death.

This, it accepts.

(Vessels, god-in-flame, had said; is that what he meant?)

And then he destroys it. Over and over, he kills them, these pieces of darkness that struggled to life. The only children they have ever had, the strange beings that result from moulding life out of death; they feel each and every existence, violently taken away, rushing through them.

Their masks litter the shore. Too many to count, each loss a stabbing pain. They plunge crying and fearful, furious, struggling, into the depths once more.

It sings no lullabies for its dead children; they struggle and fight, clinging to the lives they briefly had, and it cannot deny them. Their pain, their torment, becomes its torment.

Through them they understand the painful shortness of life cut short.

For the first time, the sea seethes, and roars.

It crashes violently against its bounds, against the shore, unwilling to do as it has always done and accept,

and for the first time, it understands **rage.**

 _“I am whisper, I am roaring,_  
_I am lullaby and scream._  
_I will find you on the shingle,_  
_I am nightmare, I am dream.”_

_“I am tidepool in the shallows,_  
_I am foam on top of wave,_  
_I am shell and shifting sand steps,_  
_**I am undertow and grave.”**_


End file.
